TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Ibis reader’ Category

By Paul Biba

ZDNet’s Tech Broiler, by Jason Perlow, has a really good review of all the major ereaders for the iPad: iBooks, Kindle, Stanza, eReader, Kobo Reader, Ibis Reader and vBookz. For once it is clear that the reviewer actually knows whereof he speaks. Good job! Anybody who is new to this space should take a look at this.

Here’s something that I didn’t know that I found in the iBooks portion of the review:

Unfortunately, iBooks doesn’t scale very well as the size of your EPUB library increases. While iBooks is perfectly fine for a few dozen or perhaps a hundred or so books purchased from the iBooks Store or synced into iTunes, it is extremely unwieldy once you approach 300+ titles loaded into the database.

In casual testing we uploaded over 1000 full-length EPUB novels to iTunes which we synced to the iPad. We encountered a number of connectivity/timeout issues with the iBooks sync on Windows, plus we discovered that iBooks performs badly when browsing in “Bookshelf” mode when many titles have been loaded into the application.

We found that the less aesthetically-pleasing “list” mode actually works better for browsing a large content library, but as the iPad only has 256MB of RAM, caching that many titles into the database still causes the app to perform very slowly, so I wouldn’t recommend using iBooks for storing your entire personal library in EPUB format.

By Paul Biba

Ibis Reader has now joined the “big guys” with a number of improvements that make it a direct competitor. Here’s the list:

Readers can now select any of the on-board fonts (omitting some unsuitable decorative fonts for clarity).

Turning pages uses a more reliable method. It’s now much harder to accidentally switch pages by brushing the screen.

All visual effects now use CSS3. On iPhones and iPads these will appear to be much smoother than before.

Many menus are on the iPad are now drop-downs, providing a better overall view of the application.

Regarding fonts, they say: On the iPad, we’ve converted the font menu to a drop-down. We’ve also included full support for all the on-board “body” fonts. The iPhone font list includes the new fonts in iOS4; if you still have 3.x, you’ll see them as well but they’ll have no effect. Until iOS4 supports embedded fonts in a non-buggy way, we’re not able to support embedded fonts either, and at this time user customizations will always override book fonts that are supported on these platforms.

Full details, with screenshots, here.

By Paul Biba

Threepress Consulting has gotten their Ibis Reader ready for the iPad. According to them if you have access to the iPad simulator you can run the Ibis Reader on it. They have a lot of technical information on their blog page and also some screenshots. Here’s one:

By Paul Biba

Liza Daly reports this in a blog post. According to her the changes are full position syncing across all clients, a new “no distractions” mode that gets rid of the screen color, the ability to make font face and size preferences in both the table of contents view and the reading mode, the ability to adjust width of the text by dragging the right margin, and, among other small fixes, the ability to export the current book to Stanza or Aldiko if you are on an iPhone/Touch or Android.

Full information and download links here.

By Chris Meadows

CNet has an article about Smartwords, an idea from start-up company Wordnik that sounds terrific but sure seems hard to describe succinctly. As Smartwords’s website puts it:

Smartwords is a lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words.

It took reading through the CNet article a couple of times to figure out that it might better be described as “an integrated dictionary on steroids.”

Existing e-book apps with dictionary support (such as eReader) are largely limited to clicking on a single word to get a definition. Wordnik wants to go further than that. With Smartwords, as CNet puts it:

Wordnik and its partners are aiming to bring deep levels of context to any kind of electronic text—be it in e-books on readers like the iPad, Kindle, or Nook, or on computers or mobile devices—by examining words and the words around them and linking readers to potentially vast amounts of information about them.

And that context is not just limited to the words around the one in question; Wordnik CEO Erin McKean suggests it might even go as far as checking out what other books you keep on your device so it knows to offer information only about words you probably haven’t seen before.

(more…)

By Paul Biba

From their blog:

We’re starting to share early betas of the Ibis Reader mobile UI for iPhones, Nexus Ones, and other Android devices with a limited group of testers. If you’re interested in joining the beta program and testing on other phones, tablets, and laptops, please email info@ibisreader.com. You may be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

More info on our upcoming ereader is available in our announcement post.

The reader will support iPhone OS, Android and Palm webOS and will support Epub. It will use the Bookserver ecosystem from the Internet Archive.

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